In a telling move, Seagate is writing off $2.3bn goodwill from its Maxtor acquisition and other intangible items.
Maxtor was purchased for $1.9bn in May, 2006, so Seagate is writing the entire acquisition value off and a bit more besides. There will be a $2.3bn non-cash charge for the second quarter results this financial year …

@ Celibrate (sic)

I keep reading so many 'in my last job I replaced so many <insert drive mfg> comments, plus, after reading Google's report on drive failures (related to 10,000+ units), that I'm really getting annoyed. Surely someone somewhere can put all this together and come up with the definitive 'most reliable drive' manufacturer?

Drive manufacturers all have their ups and downs (currently it seems to be Seagate's turn for flagellation), but it must be possible chart these. All you guys who are fitting hundreds of drives must have some data...

Perhaps accounting should change . . .

Carrying large amounts of goodwill on the books has always seemed rather suspect, so I applaud all goodwill writeoffs. Beancounter logic says when you've wasted a few billion, you should hide it by recording a goodwill asset for as long as you dare. eg Microsoft - $12.5B of goodwill - 30% of net assets; Dell 40% of net assets; Dixons Stores Group - 130% of net assets; Apple - 1% of net assets.

@Ron

"Surely someone somewhere can put all this together and come up with the definitive 'most reliable drive' manufacturer?"

I don't think so. I work at a computer surplus, and (other than the 40GB+ Deskstars which really did fail way to often) I haven't noticed a large trend. Some particular MODEL will be junk, I think either due to manufacturing problems or perhaps even firmware or design problems.. I don't know. But not the entire brand. Made the same time, some DriveCo model X will be utter crap, DriveCo model Y will be fantastically reliable. I haven't kept hard numbers, but it seems for some particular age drive brand X will be maybe 5-10% better than brand Y.... 6 months newer (or even 3 months) and they've swapped places. Basically one vendor might have a bad batch and that's enough to skew it.

adventures in accounting

More of the same

"blah blah blah blah crap blah blah blah Maxtor"

Every time a storage manufacturer is mentioned in a Reg article it gets tons of comments about how crap their drives are. So far I've seen every major manufacturer of drives, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc... slammed to hell and back. It's always the same story, too: "When I worked "x" we replaced hundreds/thousands/millions of "x" drives". Either this means all hard discs from every manufacturer suck or IT professionals are a cold and bitter lot who are really mean to their equipment.

Maxtor! Pah!

Wonderful aren't they? Had the pleasure of sending back four 200GB drives in the space of 2 months. Always got the feeling that Maxtor techs must hang about round back of WD and Seagate factory, near the skips, waiting for the rejects to be thrown out and rebadging them.

Any goodwill Maxtor had, vanished pre-2000 I'm afraid, as a very quick straw poll around most IT departments will verify. Seagate, do yourself a big favour, strip the assets and sell what's left to come schmuck, for a dollar!